1. Content-based Membership Sites
With a simple content-based
membership site you can provide new content to your members every month that
could include any of the following elements:
- A new “Special Report” created every month
- Video tutorials (Camtasia screen capture videos, for example)
- Expert interviews
- An Ask-the-Expert page
- Recommended resources
- Articles
- You can charge $37 to $297 a month (or more) for this content.
Examples of content-based
subscription sites are restaurantowner.com,
rockstarfitnessmarketing.com,
or insidermusicbusiness.com.
The profit margins can be huge,
because by keeping the content online there are no fulfillment costs. Kavit
Haria makes $80,000 a month from his membership sites selling
how-to-make-money-from-your-music type information to musicians from all over
the world with an 83 percent profit margin.
Remember that you don’t need to be
the expert yourself. You can simply be the publisher of the information and pay
an expert to provide the content every month. And you don’t need any special
skills or technology.
Finally, content-based membership
sites are extremely easy to set up and update (more on this later).
2. Monthly
Newsletters
I subscribe to various newsletters
myself to keep abreast of topics I am interested in, including StansberryResearch.com’s
investment newsletter, the “Sovereign Man Confidential” newsletter on how to
protect your assets, and Expansions.com’s newsletter on
conspiracy theories (don’t ask!). Prices vary from $17 a month to $397 a year,
and you get a monthly newsletter sent to your inbox with all the latest
information.
Nick Laight has thousands of members
at www.whatreallymakesmoney.com,
and he charges $150 a year for his business opportunity review
newsletter.
To watch Nick Laight explain how to
profit from your own newsletter, live at the Internet Millionaire Bootcamp, go
to www.laptopmillionaire.tv/nicklaight.
3. Online
Software-as-a-Service and Internet Services
Software, hosting, autoresponders,
webinar services, shopping cart tools, and so on can be amongst the most
lucrative residual income streams you can have online, because they can become
an integral part of someone’s business and these people might stay on as paying
members for years.
Examples include GoToWebinar.com (webinar service
provider), GetResponse.com
(autoresponders), HostGator.com (hosting), and
1ShoppingCart.com (shopping
cart tools).
Why not license some software or have
some created for you by a web programmer? I recently licensed a YouTube-related
software tool for $2,000, and then had a software programmer from www.vWorker.com create another
tool for $1,500. I gave access to these two software tools to my clients for
only $37 a month, and at one point I had 1,187 paying members on this continuity
program.
4. CD/DVD of the
Month
This has a very high perceived value
(higher than a paper newsletter, for example) and is incredibly easy to set
up.
For example, Kunaki.com or
Disk.com
can get a CD sent out for only $5 to $6. You simply upload your content to their
site (for example, an MP3 file or an MP4 file), and then simply upload an Excel
spreadsheet with your list of customers every month, and they duplicate your
disks and send them out to that list.
DoubleYourDating.com
provides interviews every month with dating experts through a CD-of-the-month
program (they charge $30 a month; it’s a massive eight-figure business! And a
competitor sends out a DVD each month for $79 a month!).
Another real-world example of this
was the now-defunct Columbia House Record Club offer of five CDs for just
pennies. It attracted millions of subscribers a year with that irresistible
front-end offer (the back end was a $40 a month recurring membership). By the
end of 1955, the Columbia House Record Club boasted 128,000 members who
purchased 700,000 records. In 1975, it surpassed the 3-million-member mark. The
company shipped its one-billionth record in 1990 and membership exceeded 10
million by the end of 1991.
“If I was starting all over again I
would go for a DVD-of-the-month club!” says membership site expert Lee
McIntyre.
To watch Lee McIntyre explain how to
get up to 1,000 members for your continuity program go to
www.laptopmillionaire.tv/leemcintyre.
5. Free Community
Sites
These sites are good for lead
generation (building your list). They have the potential to become viral and
give you credibility in your marketplace. The challenge is that most free
community sites don’t go viral and never build up the critical mass necessary to
make them viable and profitable. This model can be a bit hit-or-miss.
Examples of free community sites
include:
- HearandPlay.com: with 80,000 musicians, founder Jermaine Griggs generates up to $1,000,000 a year selling products to his members.
- PsychCentral.com: an independent mental health network featuring original peer-reviewed editorial content, news, research briefs, and more. It gets more than 1.1 million visitors a month.
- FitDay.com: more than 2.2 million members worldwide.
6. Done-for-Them
Services
Examples of done-for-them monthly
continuity programs include:
- Private label rights sites (PLR)—you get a new PLR product and website each month.
- Trading signal services—for example, my friend Guy Cohen offers his incredible OVI stock market indicator to traders for $97 a month (www.oviindex.com).
- Access to databases—for example, real estate auctions lists, or car auctions lists, bank property foreclosure lists (www.bankforeclosurelist.com, for example, gives you access for free for seven days, and then it costs $97 a month).
One of my all-time favorite business
success stories is that of a monthly done-for-them newsletter subscription
service created by the late John Gommes.
He hired one woman for $1,400 a month
to research and list every week all the free competitions people could enter to
win free stuff. Among those she identified were competitions like “Win a free
car by entering the Wal-Mart supermarket draw!” and “Win a free holiday to the
Caribbean by entering the Thomas Cook draw!” and “Win a year’s supply of wine,”
or “Win a free toaster!”
He promoted this newsletter service
through direct mail in the United Kingdom, and he signed up more than 50,000
paying members and made millions of dollars a year from it.
7. Fixed-term
Membership
With fixed-term memberships, content
is delivered for a specified term (e.g., a six-month tutorial with weekly
lessons sent via autoresponder e-mails). Content is created just once and is
then sold over and over again.
This is very easy to set up and run.
It is the same as the content-based subscription site, but people know how long
they’re going to stay on as members.
With content-based membership
programs, members could stay on for
months and months (sometimes years) but the average member only stays on for
four months. It is common to lose 10 percent to 15 percent of your members every
month, but as long as you grow by 20 percent a month or more your membership
base should keep expanding.
Having a fixed-term membership can
increase the stick rate from the average of four months to six months because
the members know and expect to pay for the duration of the six-month program,
but you lose the 10 percent of members who would have kept paying you for over a
year in an open-ended content-based program.
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